When painting’s enduring relevance is debated, performance art is often pitched as its polar opposite: one a venerable, hallowed tradition of object making, the other its provocative, ephemeral nemesis. But Tate Modern’s new show explores a long history of interaction between them that has led to a fertile strand of contemporary art.
“Quite a lot of artists have a painting practice that only comes about because of an engagement with performance,” says Catherine Wood, the Tate’s curator of contemporary art and performance. “I thought, ‘Where has that come from and how do we tell the story of how we’ve got to this point?’”
Inspired by the Tate Modern director Chris Dercon’s exhortation to his curators to find creative routes into the gallery’s collection, the two “historical prompts” for her show are Jackson Pollock’s Summertime: Number 9A, 1948, and David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, 1967, both key Tate works. “I was thinking of those two paintings in connection with the idea of an arena in which to act. In the Pollock painting, it is very much this literal trace of his movement, so I show it with the Hans Namuth film of him making the painting, which in itself has been as important as the painting for the next generation.” Hockney’s painting features an apparently improvised, expressive depiction of the splash of a swimming pool. “It is not at all an indexical trace of any real action—it is a simulated action that is illusionistic and fictional,” Wood says. Jack Kazan’s early 1970s film of the same title accompanies it in the show. “Kazan used Hockney’s paintings as a kind of prompt for acting in a way that was semi-documentary, but semi-fiction, just as the paintings are themselves: a more fabulous version of real life.”
Among those who took on and developed Pollock’s ideas was the Italian Situationist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, whose 70-metre-long “industrial painting”, one of a series of long monoprints with dripped paint, features in the show. “He hired models, glamorous women, to stand at the opening and be draped in the paintings,” Wood says. “The installation of the show in Turin in 1958 looks like a fabric shop. The work looks like an evolution of Pollock, but then what he did with it was a million miles away conceptually.”
Many artists took a more aggressive approach, like Niki de Saint Phalle and Shozo Shimamoto, who shot at the canvas with a .22 rifle and a cannon respectively. Painting was also transferred onto the artists’ bodies, Wood adds. “In the 1970s, the use of drag and body painting and the material of paint in make-up as a critique, especially from a feminist perspective, opened up ways in which artists re-engaged with painting in subsequent generations,” she says.
• A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance, Tate Modern, London, 14 November-1 April 2013
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Drip, drag and drape: paint in motion'
